Glenn Robinson, Head of Creative
Buyer personas are the key to preparing and empowering your sales team for success. To paraphrase the great Chinese military general and strategist Sun Tzu, if you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result.
While your potential customers are certainly not the enemy, Sun Tzu’s theory also applies to sales. That is, the more your sales team knows about your typical buyer, the easier it will be for them to secure their business. Buyer personas are essential because they enable salespeople to truly know who they’re selling to.
Without thoroughly researched and precisely crafted buyer personas, your sales team is essentially going in cold. And you know what they say about poor performance and the Six Ps of Planning.
While today information is more accessible than it’s ever been, helping your sales team to truly understand your target market isn’t simply a case of finding their profile on LinkedIn or other social channels and peering into their professional history and personal life. Nor is it simply reading the About Us page on a company website.
“Without thoroughly researched and precisely crafted buyer personas, your sales team is essentially going in cold.”
A buyer persona is a fictional, generalised representation of your ideal customers. While fictional, buyer personas are most effective when grounded in fact. When well researched and precisely created, buyer personas provide a truly deep understanding of the kind of person or organisation that needs or wants what you’re selling.
Buyer personas equip your sales team with the essential customer information needed to precisely speak to the concerns, challenges, desires, and goals of your target audience. They instruct your salespeople on how to talk to prospects in a nuanced, personally tailored way. As such, they should be the secret weapon of your sales team.
When you have highly researched and precisely created buyer personas, your sales team will have the answers to many questions about the customer that are essential for sales success. These include answers to questions such as:
Once you have all of this important information, you can use it to define two essential things:
Well-developed buyer personas will reveal common misconceptions and barriers of entry that your target audience might have towards your business.
The best way to create effective buyer personas is to base them upon facts and thorough research. Start by seeking first-hand insights from your existing customers; the more recent, the better. Interview them, if possible, while also seek informed insights from market research organisations, sales training experts, and strategic marketers.
When you invest in developing precise buyer personas for your sales team, you will soon notice that frustration and fear over lack of leads will subside, replaced by incremental and sustained improvements in sales.
“The best way to create effective buyer personas is to base them upon facts and thorough research.”
But with buyer personas in hand, it’s not just your sales team that will be better positioned to succeed. Your whole business will enjoy greater success, simply because the information and insights in great buyer personas are useful for all key decision-makers in your business, from managers to marketers.
As part of our sales training service, we help businesses develop highly researched, in-depth buyer personas that provide sales teams with the critical insights needed for sales success.
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